{Wacky Wednesday} Recipe: Crock pot Lasagna

Do you love lasagna?  But you don't love all of the work involved to make it?  Today I'm going to share a recipe for making lasagna in the crock pot! Yes, the crock pot!

Ingredients:
1 to 1.5 lb ground beef
1 medium onion chopped
1 can (29 ounces) tomato sauce
1 can (6 ounce) Italian style tomato paste
2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
1 container (15 ounces) part skim ricotta cheese
1 cup grated Parmesan cheese
3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
12-15 lasagna noodles uncooked (no boil kind work great)

Brown ground beef and onion in skillet until the meat is thoroughly cooked, drain.
In a bowl, stir together the tomato sauce, tomato paste, and Italian seasoning.
Add this to the meat, stir. Set aside.
In a separate bowl, combine the ricotta, Parmesan and 2 cup of the mozzarella cheese. 
Spray inside of crock pot with non-stick spray (or use a crock pot liner).
Cover bottom of crock pot with about 1/4 of the sauce/meat.
Layer lasagna noodles to cover. Break up the noodles to cover more area.
Top the noodles with the 1/2 the cheese mixture.
Top the cheese mixture with 1/4 sauce/meat mixture
Top with more lasagna noodles
Top with remaining cheese mixture, then 1/4 of the sauce/meat mixture.
Top with more lasagna noodles and finally the remaining sauce/meat mixture on top.

Cover and cook on low heat setting about 4-6 hours. ( I found it to be done at 4 hours)
Sprinkle the top of the lasagna with remaining 1 cup of mozzarella cheese, cover and let stand 10 minutes or until cheese is melted.

Makes 8 servings

You can make it up the night before and place the filled crock pot insert in the refrigerator. In the morning before you head of to your busy day, put it in the crock pot and turn it on.  Now you can have lasagna in a jiffy, even on a weeknight!

Mangia!  Enjoy!
Cathy

Looking Back - Recipe Card Box

Hello, everybody!

This is LeAnn, a new member of Krisi's CT.  I can be found as ScaccoGirl over in the gallery and forums at ScrapMatters.  I'm here with today's episode of Looking Back.

Today we'll be taking a look at a project I made using Krisi's "Box it up: 3x5 card box" template:

I decided to go with the food theme of the recipe box and chose Erica Zane's What's Cooking? {the whole batch} kit to go with it:

Only, the finished product will not actually hold recipes.  It's going to hold photos!
Grandma Merry LOVES to have photos of her grandkids,  and I had some pics of her making a pancake breakfast for us the last time we were at her house.  Sounds like the perfect recipe to me! (Hee! Hee!  I love puns!) :)

Here's how it happened:

I chose papers and elements for the box template.  Krisi's template includes "divider" tabs, too, so I chose complementary papers for those.  I saved each piece as a jpg file and took the files to Office Max on a flash drive to have them printed on heavy cardstock.  Their laser printer gives the images a bit of a sheen and makes the project look more professional.  It's nice, but, of course, not necessary, especially since Krisi's templates print on regular letter-size paper.

I wanted to make sure the box was really sturdy, since it was a recipe box, so I found some cardboard backing and glued the cardstock to it.  After the glue dried, I cut around the template and scored the fold lines with a bone folding tool.  I used another piece of cardboard as a guide.

 Then I folded the pieces and glued the front/bottom together and the back/top together.  Because the cardboard was so stiff, I used rubber bands to keep the pieces in place.

When those dried, I glued the two pieces together to complete the box.  I also used a bunch of rubber bands for that step.

After it dried I added a dot of velcro with sticky backing to keep the lid closed.

For the "recipes", I made little 3" x 5" canvases and scrapped layouts of our breakfast fun.

I cut those out, along with the divider tabs, and put them in the box.  Voila!  

[NOTE TO READERS:  Please do not think that, in regards to hybrid, you either "have it" or "you don't", because, in general, hybrid projects are a bit of a trial and error experiment.  Case in point: I glued the cardstock to the cardboard, then cut it, then scored it, and then glued it all together.  Because my cardboard was so thick and stiff, the folded edges of the cardstock sort of "popped" and frayed a little bit on the outside.  Now, it wasn't enough to throw the whole thing out and start over.  I really had two options:  take a bit of glue and smooth the fray, or I could have inked the edges of the box.  I decided to glue down the worst parts of the fray, and let the rest look "antiqued."  In retrospect, I could have cut out the pieces of cardstock and cardboard separately, scored and folded them, and then glued them together, trimming the cardboard layer underneath where it would stick out farther than the top layer of cardstock.  But I went with it, and I love how it turned out!  Don't be afraid to try hybrid because something might go wrong.  If it does - it just adds character! :) ]

I hope you enjoyed this project.  If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment here, or PM me in the ScrapMatters forum.

Have a great weekend!
LeAnn